My life, until about 12 years ago, was quite safe. I went through school, went to University, got a job. I think in some ways I was blissfully unaware of what life could offer if I only stepped away from the safe path. It wasn’t until Simon made the monumental decision not to return to employment after he was made redundant that life for us started to shift. He set up the company that is still going strong and a few years later I joined him. Stepping away from the security of employment is something we’ll never regret, even if at times it’s scary as hell.

When it came to our children’s education, we took the safe path and registered our eldest daughter at the local school. Despite being a lovely, community environment, it’s still a school and the fact that we sent her there has never quite sat comfortably with us. A whole year later and we have decided to take the plunge and homeschool. Just today in fact we handed in the letter that de-registers her. My frame of mind while writing this is a mixture of high excitement and mild terror.

Stepping away from something safe and  known can be terrifying. Leaving things in someone else’s hands, someone trained and experienced, someone who does the job of teaching year after year, feels safe, like apron strings. Going against the grain feels risky. Yet, as we learned with our business, it’s also the thing that makes you feel alive, it’s letting go. For us it’s simple, the more you let go, the more you grow and learn. The more you hang on, the more  you stay the same. Are you hanging on or letting go?

The programme showed up a few interesting things. Firstly, and most interestingly, that almost anything can be learnt through the in-depth pursuit of a single subject. It makes me wonder just how far learning could go along this route. It also highlighted how far away this approach was from the way that we’re all normally taught. Lastly, it was interesting to see a teacher (I think he was a chemistry teacher) embarking on a journey himself.

The web is changing learning. There is almost an unlimited range of knowledge at children’s fingertips now and this shift has the potential to cause a leap from the old, compartmentalised way of learning to a new, complex system that allows for boundless exploration. But what is this educational future going to look like?

A couple of years ago I studied, for a short while, with a graphic designer who had gone to art school in Leipzig, Germany. He had spent a whole year of his education drawing, and re-drawing all the letters of a single typeface. What seems like a ridiculously narrow focus was, according to him, an incredible learning experience. Through this activity he had developed craft and learnt about all the important elements of design like composition, contrast and line.

This way of learning contrasts sharply with the self-driven, “surfing” education that the internet might draw us into, if we’re not careful. What we need in the face of such educational possibilities is a sense of purpose, a singularity of vision. And here is where things can really change for the better. My school experiences seem to share a lot with Naomi’s. After all, we did go to school at about the same time. I imagine, however, that our experiences are pretty similar to most people’s. The idea of school seems to be that there is a basic set of Things We Need to Know.

Things We Need to Know seems to have an unspoken hierarchy. At the top we have maths and science, followed by languages and humanities and then any kind of artistic pursuit. If you can know a bit of all of these then the school’s job is done. Most importantly, you don’t need to know why you need to know these things. I know that Naomi had a terrible time trying to get to the bottom of why she needed to learn calculus. It’s actually pretty useful if you want to be an economist or a physicist, but it’s not that relevant to most things.

So this is where my school went wrong. It’s not very useful for children to be told that they need to know certain things because that’s just the way it is. How is anyone supposed to inspire children when they can’t even get across the fact that algebra helps you to work out things you don’t know? This is the purpose of algebra. It seems logical, then, to demand a school system that removes the barriers between subjects, that gets across why it’s good to learn things, and that uses exciting, real-world projects (like the fireworks one) as a framework for the infinitely complex learning experiences that are available to us. Perhaps teachers will learn something too.

So, this is how the majority of us guide our children through school – a mix of hopefulness and damage limitation. What are the other options? Well, if you earn enough, of course, you can send them to a private school. There’s no questioning the resources and encouragement this gives them access to, but private schools are just good schools – better versions of the schools that we have for free. Which makes us ask ourselves a really important question. Are we happy with the way the school system works and, if not, would a really good version of it be any better?

One of the schools we visited on our grand tour of educational possibilities had a rating of “outstanding” from the UK inspection body, Ofsted. When we got there we discovered that outstanding meant that every child conformed to a rigid system of quantifiable achievement. They had a way of doing things at the school and you fitted in with that or you left. You’d laugh about this if it wasn’t so depressing. After all, “outstanding” actually means standing out and from what we saw that was definitely discouraged.

So, the big problem is that school on a large scale is about creating a well-oiled machine. It’s actually the opposite of good parenting, where you spend your time endeavouring to find your child’s unique capabilities, where you nurture their individual interests. I remember a quote about reasonable people fitting in with the world and unreasonable people expecting the world to fit in with them, the argument being that all progress was made by unreasonable people. So, are we being unreasonable? And is that really a good thing?

It seems that many people who are successful (by which I mean that they spend their lives pursuing a vocation that excites them and makes them happy) succeed despite school, not because of it. In fact, it’s not hard to see the school system as an assault course. You spend your school years overcoming wave after wave of subjects you have no interest in – learning them by heart and passing exams, only to claw your way out of the mud of irrelevance like a crack commando. Ultimately, if you make it that far, you earn the right to pursue a PhD in the one thing you were pretty much always interested in but everyone told you had no future. OK, so I’m being extreme. But school is like the army in so many ways it’s scary.

We’re left with the feeling that we want to do something different. It’s actually quite disturbing to realise how many things in our lives we want to do differently now that we’re really thinking about them. We’re starting to wonder if we’re freaks. Of course we’re considering home-schooling, but the problem with being educated in a system ourselves is that it makes considering an alternative very hard. We’ve been institutionalised. All we can do is try and approach it as logically as we possibly can (as we’ve been trying to do with everything else).

Home-schooling offers some real advantages, such as the ability to nurture real interest, but isn’t it also vain? Do we really know what’s best for our children or do we just think we do? The other problem with home-schooling is that it doesn’t expose children to the “real” world. In other words they don’t get to mix with vast numbers of other children suffering the same mind-numbing, day-to-day misery as themselves (sorry, that sentence wasn’t supposed to end so negatively, it was just to good an opportunity to miss). Seriously though, the lack of large-scale social interaction in home-schooling is a worry for us. It’s also a genuine concern that our children might not discover the world as it really is, rather than how it is in our cocoon, until it’s too late.

As a result of all this thinking we’re left with the feeling that all we really want for our children is a really good school. We like the idea of home-schooling but we can see real problems. We’re not teachers. We have other jobs. Home-schooling in some ways seems like giving up. Aren’t we just saying that we’re happy for all those other children to suffer the school system, but that ours are too special?  What we actually need to do is re-design the school system from the ground up. We need to be unreasonable and say that that we think the school system could be better for everyone, not just our children. We need to clarify our beliefs, write our manifesto. Input greatly appreciated…